CharGer 3.4b2 review

CharGer is a conceptual graph editor intended to support research projects and education. Its current version is primarily an editor to create visual display of graphs.

It is deliberately and explicitly a research tool meant for conceptual graph researchers to explore implementation issues in conceptual graph interfaces.

Using the software will require some familiarity with conceptual graphs, including knowing about concepts and relations, type hierarchies and type/referent pairs. Knowing about actors will also be very helpful.

Any number of graph windows may be opened for editing.
Export a graph to PNG, BMP, JPG, PSD (Photoshop) and TGA formats.
Auto-save safeguards to help prevent losing a graph.
Copy/cut/paste of graphic elements within a graph and between graphs and to other applications
Undo/redo for most editing changes (unlimited)
Zoom in and out of a graph
Shortcut keystrokes to move and explicitly resize graph objects and contexts
Keystrokes to switch editing tools.
Ability to set user preferences and save them between sessions.
Some re-sizing of contexts, concepts, and relation nodes
Ability to remove referents from a selected set (crude generalization)
Custom colors for all graph objects, and the ability to set one’s own default color scheme.
Some ability to customize font displays.

Compatibility

Note: due to some problems with the current Conceptual Graph Interchange Format (CGIF) standard, CharGer's layout information is temporarily unavailable when using CGIF files. This problem is being worked on and will be fixed in the near future. If layout information is important to you, then use the CharGer format (*.cg) for the graphs and simply save them as CGIF when you need to.

Portability to all major platforms (i.e., as portable as Java based on JDK 1.4.2)
Ability to save and retrieve graphs from files, in a proprietary (i.e., non-standard) text format (*.cg)
Saving of graphs in CGIF form according to the standard (courtesy of Finnegan Southey's Notio) - without layout information
(DISABLED) Importing of graphs in CGIF form (courtesy of Finnegan Southey's Notio) - without layout information
View the CGIF form of graphs (courtesy of Finnegan Southey's Notio) - without layout information
Paraphrase graph into English (other languages in preparation)
A Wordnet interface has been added, where a synset (word-sense) entry can be added to any graph node (requires separate installation of Wordnet 2.0)

Actors/Databases

Activation of some built-in actors, including several primitive ones for arithmetic and elementary operations.
Visual animation facility for monitoring actors as they operate
Database access through actors, restricted to tab-separated text file "databases" at present.
Capability to automatically create a skeleton graph from a database suitable for providing database semantics.
A plugin interface whereby developers can create their own actors and add them to the CharGer.jar file.
A displaybar actor that will display a referent value in its own graphical display window.